these lines full of her beauty,
‘Who can this woman be?’ and will not comprehend.

As for the other apparatus in the book, I have made only a few slight changes to the very helpful notes by Estelle Gaudry and Jean-Yves Tadié, and to M. Tadié’s foreword, when it was necessary to supply a first name, for instance, or an identification, or otherwise enlarge upon a reference that might not be obvious to an Anglophone reader.

By way of coda: After these letters were brought into public view from where they had been residing in the Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits in Paris, and after some excerpts from them, in the original French, were published in Le Nouvel Observateur online, on October 10, 2013, an interesting response added a few more details to our understanding of Proust’s life and activities.

A person by the lyrical name of Lerossignol – ‘the nightingale’ – writes an online comment to the article. He is the grandson of a florist with a shop in the seaside town of Houlgate, on the stretch of the Normandy coast aptly known as the Côte Fleurie (the Flowery Coast); Houlgate was a neighbouring town to Cabourg, where Proust liked to stay at the Grand Hôtel. Guests marvelled, according to Philippe Soupault in his memoirs, over ‘how Monsieur Proust rented five expensive rooms, one to live in, the other four to “contain” the silence’. Cabourg became Balbec in Proust’s novel.

The flower shop was the one Proust patronized in the years 1908 to 1913 when sending flowers to, among others, Mme Williams. M. Lerossignol writes that the family archives in his possession include records of the shop’s transactions which mention Proust’s sending flowers to the Williamses; he has therefore known the name for a long time and was aware that the couple must have been acquaintances of Proust’s. But only now, with the publication of the present letters, does he know who they were. He would like, incidentally, to correct one statement in the commentary that accompanies the extracts – that in those days etiquette required that a man send flowers not directly to a married woman but to her husband. He can attest from his family records that this was not always the case, and he knows in which cases Proust sent flowers to the husband and in which, in fact, directly to the wife. With regard to the Williamses, however, he adds, Proust was always very correct. (See, for example, letter 3.) M. Lerossignol goes on to remark that Proust, despite his illness, did venture into the family flower shop: Lerossignol’s grandmother counted thirty-two visits before 1912.

From the invoices of Proust’s orders it is possible to know the names of those with whom Proust associated while staying at the vast Grand Hôtel Cabourg, before his health worsened to such an extent that he confined himself permanently to Paris. M. Lerossignol has had the idea of organizing a tour of the still surviving villas of those to whom Proust sent flowers in Houlgate ordered from Au Jardin des Roses, the florist of M. Lerossignol’s grandparents, who were also named Lerossignol.

LYDIA DAVIS

Notes

[Content in brackets has been supplied by the translator.]

1. Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust, trans. Barbara Bray (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1973), p. 382. On Mme Straus, a client of Doctor Williams who considered him the best dentist in Paris and insisted on Proust’s consulting him, see p. 108. See also note 4 below.
2. The line is from Victor Hugo’s poem ‘Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre’ [What speaks the shadow’s mouth] in his collection Les Contemplations [Contemplations], published in 1856.
3. See letter 17.
4. Geneviève Halévy (1849–1926) married, first, Georges Bizet, then the lawyer Emile Straus. She was Proust’s great friend and confidante.
5. M. and Mme Williams were having construction work done, and Proust obviously suffered from the noise.
6. The Count Robert de Montesquiou (1855–1921) was a man of letters and friend of Proust, a dandy and a model for the character of Baron de Charlus [in In Search of Lost Time].
7. He is thinking of Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, a spa town in Normandy, ‘a home where you have memories of your family’. Proust also mentions the family home of Mme Williams in Le Vésinet.
8. Portraits of Painters was published in 1896 by Heugel and later included in Pleasures and Days, published by Calmann-Lévy on June 12, 1896.
9. From 1900 to 1912, Proust published numerous articles in Le Figaro, which makes the dating of this letter tricky. It could be either from 1909, after the publication of Pastiches, or from 1912 after that of excerpts from Swann’s Way.
10. ‘Prométhée triomphant’ [Prometheus triumphant], an oratorio for solo voices and chorus set to a poem by Paul Reboux. Performed in concert on Friday, December 17, 1909, conducted by [Eberhard] Schwickerath. Reynaldo Hahn and a few French friends attended the concert and the banquet that followed it.
11. This occurred on September 30, 1914 (information kindly supplied by Mme Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer; M. Proust, Correspondance, vol. 13, p. 305). [To be mentioned in the army’s ordre du jour signified that one was being honoured for one’s courage or devotion to duty.]
    [Military service review board: the meaning of Proust’s own term is unclear. He speaks of a conseil de contre-réforme, which did not exist as such. A conseil de réforme, however, was a body charged with examining soldiers who might be declared unfit to serve. Proust has added the word contre (against). He uses this same formulation in another letter, one written February 12, 1915, in which he says: ‘My brother, since the first day, has been in great danger, but actually so far has escaped everything and is doing well. I have a conseil de contre-réforme to pass, but have not yet been summoned’ (letter to Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, Correspondance générale, vol. 4, p. 67). ]
12. Alfred Agostinelli died May 30, 1914.
13. John 3:8.
14. Joachim Joseph Charles Henri (1875–1918), third count of Clary, son of Napoleon II’s aide-de-camp, a friend of Proust, Lucien Daudet, and Montesquiou, presumably an inspiration to Proust for the japonisant part of In Search, but also a model for Baron de Charlus going blind, in Time Found Again. Clary was the author of L’île du soleil couchant [The island of the setting sun], published by Arthème Fayard in 1912, a novel about Japan cited by Marcel Proust in one of his letters of November 1912.
    [Since Joachim Clary is mentioned in no fewer than eight letters of the present volume, we may say a little more about him. The following description is taken from a memoir by his friend, the English composer and suffragist Ethel Smyth, in her Impressions That Remained – Memoirs of Ethel Smyth (Knopf, 1919). She had first known Clary as one of the ‘enfants de la maison’ in the English residence of the Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III:
    I had first known Clary as a clever, good-looking, active, rather spoilt youth; now, though still a young man, he was a cripple, scarcely able to move hand or foot, his limbs twisted and gnarled with arthritis, in constant pain day and night, and totally blind. Yet his originality, his culture, his unconquerable sense of humour and, above all, his superb courage, made our friendship one of the assets of my life.
    Ethel Smyth remarks that Clary’s death was ‘wholly unexpected’. (At the time she describes seeing Clary, she would have been in her late fifties, Clary about 41. He was to die the following year.)]
15. The letter is torn in places, and passages are missing.
16. Doctor Léon Faisans (1851–1922), often mentioned in Proust’s correspondence. He was a specialist in respiratory illnesses and a physician at the Hôpital Beaujon.
17. June and July 1914, pages 48 and 52 of La Nouvelle Revue Française, excerpted from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and The Guermantes Way I.
18. The poet Maurice Rostand and the painter Jacques-Emile Blanche were close friends, as was Proust, of Lucien Daudet. Each of them devoted a laudatory article to Swann’s Way.
19. ‘The cruel fates.’ A verse from Virgil’s Aeneid, 6:882, addressed to Marcellus, nephew of Augustus. [It is perhaps a reference to the war.]
20. Proust was envisaging at this point a work in three volumes; the second was to have included the present In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and The Guermantes Way, in shorter versions. The Bibliothèque nationale de France holds the proofs of this volume printed by Grasset.
21. This important revelation was omitted from the final version of In Search of Lost Time.
22. Title of a book of poems by Anna, Countess de Noailles.
23. What is Proust referring to here? Is he alluding to the play by Maeterlinck, to a poem by Mallarmé, or to a poem by his neighbour herself?
24. Respectively, Agrippa d’Aubigné, Les tragiques, 4; Paul Verlaine, Sagesse; Gérard de Nerval, ‘Artémis’ and ‘El Desdichado’, Les Chimères.
25. The reference is to Pelléas and Mélisande, the lyric drama by Maurice Maeterlinck and Claude Debussy.
26. Perhaps an allusion to the train trip to Balbec described in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, which appeared in La Nouvelle Revue Française in 1914 and in which the narrator, borne away by the train, watches a young milkmaid recede into the distance.
27. Reynaldo Hahn was in the Argonne at Vauquois in April 1915. Bertrand de Fénelon (1878–1914) died December 17, 1914, at Mametz. [Since this fact was obscured by contradictory rumours until it was declared official in March of the following year, Proust did not fully accept it until then.]
28. Mme Williams’s brother, Lieutenant Alphonse Emile Georges Marcel Pallu (1882–1915) of the Third Regiment of Dragoons, died for France (thus designated) as a result of an illness contracted in the field, February 13, 1915, at Nantes.
29. The dentist’s office was on the third floor, above Proust’s apartment. His private